Saturday, November 27, 2010

While discussing tXtFL on the mobile handset, I realized that one feature that would keep a person from ending a game is a good end-game. In other words, some sort of celebration or high scores posting at the end of an arduous football game is much more satisfying than a simple score summary. I decided to try integrating the social platform OpenFeint, which I first discovered while playing a simple iPhone game, for posting high scores and point margins after playing a tXtFL football game. Now in the latestiteration of tXtFL on Android, you can track game stats and drive summaries throughout the game, and then share your score with the world through leaderboards!

In my search for social platforms I also came across Scoreloop, which has fancy features such as virtual currency, not to mention a very friendly and responsive support staff. I may give that a shot as well.

Friday, November 26, 2010

This time last year I picked up one of my favorite Black Friday treats, the very laptop on which I'm now typing. A year later and none the richer, I was looking for even better deals to sweeten the holiday. How about a nice Android phone? Or a new Android tablet? (ok, you can tell what's on my mind)

But what do I really need? Ever since upgrading my desktop from Windows Vista to 7, graphics performance has taken a nosedive. Yes, for some reason, Vista has been superior. Previously, I could cruise the skies of San Francisco on FlightGear with wings like eagles, but lately I've been stuttering the skies at 1-2 frames per second on the same simulator. I didn't even bother testing Need For Speed. And it certainly couldn't handle the stunning and intensive graphics of tXtFL (j/k).

So this Black Friday, I thought I'd treat myself to a new graphics card. I'd always been wary of my low-end ATI Radeon X1550 graphics card. My Dell Inspiron 9200 isn't the newest, and one could potentially argue for a complete system upgrade instead, but I'm actually quite fond of the machine. My buddies even told me that I could pick up a handy dedicated graphics card for the likes of $10. As much as I like that deal, $10 can buy you at least 6 sodas at the cafeteria, so I tried an alternate route they suggested.

I tried out a graphics card stress test called FurMark (don't ask me why it's named that). I was reassured that the 32-bit version works on my 64-bit machine, but to my surprise, it aborted a test with an error message saying that my card was not OpenGL 2.0 compatible. Aha! That sign very likely meant that my card was underperforming because subpar graphics drivers forbade OpenGL 2 capabilities. The default Win7 drivers were probably the generic type and unable to tap into the latent graphical prowess of the X1550.

A little forum searching later, I learned that Vista graphics card drivers up through version 9.1 are compatible with Win7. Fortunately, these drivers are freely available and installable. Moments later, FurMark was churning away at graphics card benchmarks, and I was flying my F-4 Phantom through the San Francisco fog. And all at the price of one download, I think it's my best Black Friday deal thus far.

Notable Quotable

"This club with a shortage of ego and an excess of character ascended to baseball's throne in the way it preferred, with a collaborative performance." (Chris Haft, on the San Francisco Giants' 2012 World Series victory)

"In a society that craves results now, in a world that demands excellence every day, head coaches rarely are allowed the time they need to grow into the job and master it. Reminders of it come every year at this time. Head coaches are fired, head coaches are hired and the coaching carousel spins without producing in the ways NFL owners had hoped." (Adam Shefter, on the "coaching carousel" of rapid coaching firing/hiring after the season)

"A perennial danger among contemporary students of the New Testament is to overlook the two-thousand-year history of debate and interpretation generated by these twenty-seven books. The pressure to be up-to-date with the voluminous contemporary literature, combined with the penchant endemic to twenty-first-century Western culture to revere the innovative, even the faddish, and be suspicious of the traditional, conspires to blind us to our connections with twenty centuries of Christian readers." (Carson DA & Moo DJ, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 31)